The etymology and typology of “trash bean”

Kindly contributed by C, here’s a sign from the toilets of a restaurant in Jaén:

Don’t though any papers into the water close. Use the trash bean.

There is too much material here to deal with in one post, but we can report that modern forensic linguistics, combined with a couple of glasses of wine, have led to the discovery that “trash bean” is the work of a team from the University of Jaén consisting of a semanticist and a phoneticist who have been moonlighting happily but not always completely successfully as tourist copywriters. The base conditions and sequence of events were as follows:

Dr Semanticist is a rough and ready field lexicographer who has acquired some notion of English semantics but continues to struggle with phonetics.

Dr Phoneticist on the other hand is a somewhat unworldly type who is pretty comfortable with English phonetics but not semantics.

Dr Semanticist, who knows what a bin is but can’t pronounce it, is dictating to Dr Phoneticist. At the moment of truth he performs the characteristic Spanish [ɪ] → [i] transformation.

Dr Phoneticist transcribes the semanticist’s pronunciation correctly in accordance with one of the options available in English.

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Between thieves, who profit from mistranslation, and fools, who know no better (and no profit), there lurks an intriguing class: lunatics, whose often considerable mind is whisked off to unexpected places by absurd fancies as to the nature of their task. The bigot Barnaby Rich writes in The Irish Hubbub (1617):

It is suggested that an old Spanish slang word has nothing at all to do with Dutch pirates but instead adds weight to David Kleinecke’s generally discarded South American etymology of the word “pidgin”.

The other day in the London City out of scientific interest I ate from a hipster stall a portion of /pʌɪˈɛlə/. It wasn’t paella – it looked and tasted like sewage sludge, black, oily, foul – but I couldn’t work out (and didn’t dare ask) what method had led to this madness.

It’s turning out to be more complicated than I thought: post first, correction below, clarification bottom.

Esperanza Aguirre’s Madrid appears to have made impressive advances in implementing bilingual (Spanish-English) education in the region. Unfortunately it didn’t bother to check that Adsolut, the creative agency on the system’s new ad campaign, had included a translator in its €127,600 budget. …

Föcked Translation (413): I posted to a light-hearted blog called Fucked Translation over on Blogger from 2007 to 2016, when I was often in Barcelona. Its original subtitle was "What happens when Spanish institutions and businesses give translation contracts to relatives or to some guy in a bar who once went to London and only charges 0.05€/word." I never actually did much Spanish-English translation (most of my work is from Dutch, French and German) but I was intrigued and amused by the hubristic Spanish belief, then common, that nepotism and quality went hand in hand, and by the nemeses that inevitably followed.

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Notice also the “water close” which must actually be “water closé” by the final consonant-dropping phenomenon documented, for example, in A. Bryson Gerrard’s Cassel’s Colloquial Spanish. Other examples he gives are “coñá” (cognac), “Drisa” (Dry Sack sherry) and “Moza” (Mozart).